Nuclear testing may need to resume soon

The United States may have no choice but to restart nuclear testing to certify that its stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable, especially if new warhead designs are developed in the coming years, according to a senior government nuclear scientist and adviser.

Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and currently a senior laboratory fellow, told Global Security Newswire in an interview that although the "principal focus is how to do we keep the stockpile safe without testing," the nation's nuclear weapons complex is finding it increasingly difficult to continue maintaining the thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons.

Following a testing moratorium initiated by former President George H.W. Bush, the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories are required to certify annually that the U.S. stockpile works properly and safely.

"We're still able to sign these certification letters today, but we can't do this indefinitely without testing," Hecker said. "If you can't test them you have to understand them better," he added, referring to new and increasingly advanced computer models and other tools now being widely used to study nuclear weapons and to simulate their detonation.

The new tools, however, are not becoming available "fast enough to offset" the loss of expertise and experience that has resulted from more than a decade of not conducting any live nuclear tests, according to Hecker. The last U.S. explosive nuclear test occurred Sept. 22, 1992.

He said a resumption of testing could be even more necessary for the development of any new nuclear weapons designs.

"Some of the more exotic ideas would require nuclear testing," he said, adding that members of the nuclear weapons complex would "never field a significantly new design without testing."

He said the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator-currently the focus of one feasibility study-would not require testing because the proposal calls for the modification of a current design that has already been tested. In developing a weapons of mass destruction agent-defeat weapon, however, "they might get into effects testing to learn more than the yield," he added.

So far, "no programs are in the development stage," Hecker said. "There really isn't much there," he said.

Still, the Pentagon last fall raised the prospect of renewed nuclear testing, citing the need to validate aging weapon systems and the possibility of developing new nuclear weapons to respond to terrorists and rogue states. Such weapons would be designed to destroy underground and heavily fortified chemical, biological or nuclear storage facilities.

"We will need to refurbish several aging weapon systems," wrote Undersecretary of Defense Edward Aldridge in an October memo. "We must also be prepared to respond to new nuclear weapon requirements in the future," he said.

Congress recently authorized the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories to assess their ability to restart underground testing within six months if political leaders determine that the moratorium must be lifted for national security reasons.

Some Pentagon officials "value nuclear weapons highly; consequently, they are very uncomfortable with an extended moratorium on nuclear testing," wrote Michael Krepon, founding president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, in this month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Indeed, the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review, unveiled a year ago, originally contained an explicit reference to the potential need to restart nuclear tests but it was left out of the final version, according to administration officials and independent experts familiar with the internal Pentagon debate.

Meanwhile, the United States is not prevented by any treaties from conducting such tests. Although former president Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Senate rejected the treaty in 1999 despite widespread support among several former presidents and dozens of former senior military officers.

Hecker's personal assessment of the likely need to lift the test moratorium will help refuel the debate over whether to resume nuclear testing. Opposition is widespread.

"If there is a crisis in brainpower, I don't know if exploding nuclear weapons will solve it," said Michael Levi, director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Moreover, "everything depends on what sort of standards you want to apply to these weapon systems," he said. "If you want a 99 percent reliability, maybe you need to test, but not if you put it on a missile that works only 80 percent of the time," he said.

Levi added, "I doubt that Bush wants to run [for re-election] on a platform of having broken a 10-year moratorium on nuclear testing."

Other critics, however, say the Bush administration position on the potential need for future nuclear testing is characteristic of its larger strategic view.

"Nuclear arsenals will have to be retained indefinitely, not just as a weapon of last resort, or as a deterrent against a nuclear attack, but as an ordinary tool in the military armory, to be used in the resolution of conflicts, and even in pre-emptive strikes, should political contingencies demand it," said British physicist and 1995 Nobel peace laureate Joseph Rotblat, addressing a nonproliferation conference this month in London.

"This is the essence of current U.S. nuclear policy, and I see it as a very dangerous policy," Rotblat said.